


The Mortal Sin of Cordelia Flyte

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh, El Laberinto del Fauno | Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Genre: Catholic Character, Catholic Guilt, Communist Character, Cordelia and Mercedes inadvertently compare Ofelia to Kurt, Cordelia was for fascism before she was against it, Gen, Guilt over things you did because of your Catholicism, Spanish Civil War, The most passive-aggressive prayer in Christendom, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 14:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7175030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After World War II, Cordelia Flyte meets a Spanish exile around her age in London, and thinks back to who it was for whom she worked in Spain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mortal Sin of Cordelia Flyte

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by how uncomfortable and sad I became at my realization that Cordelia, whom I greatly enjoy and admire and who is probably my favorite character in her canon, was almost certainly intended to be read as a Franquist. I began to wonder how this might have played into or played against her (and Waugh's) clear horror at Nazism-as-such and her later decision to join the Allied war effort in "the big one".
> 
> The story is peppered with call-backs to lines and concepts from BR because it's from Cordelia's perspective. If I ever write something from Mercedes' perspective I'll rewatch PL and pepper the fic with call-backs to lines and concepts from it instead.
> 
> The Croatia anecdote is a modified version of something from the family history of a friend of mine.
> 
> This story is written with the uttermost respect for Waugh's faith and del Toro's politics, and with next to no respect for Waugh's politics.

The last time Lady Cordelia Flyte had dined at the Ritz had been in 1927, with Charles Ryder. Cordelia had recently lost her brother (to drink), her sister (to an illicit marriage), and her mother (to the Four Last Things); Charles had recently lost Cordelia's brother. He'd yet to care terribly for her sister then, and he hadn't got the right sentiment for her mother. (She hadn't really had the right sentiment for her mother either.) She had been fifteen, and had prayed never to fall in love. He had been twenty-two or thereabouts, and could sincerely make no such prayers.

Now it was 1948. Cordelia, along with Julia, had returned to England after the end of the Mandate in Palestine; she had found it much changed, Brideshead much the worse off for having been a barracks, Charles Ryder a Major now serving in one of the remaining places east of Suez, Bridey and Beryl comfortably ensconced at some resort in Dorset or Devon and only travelling to London when he wanted to vote on something major, and the country in general under much gentler Labour rule than anybody on her side of politics generally had before and during the War feared. Additionally her flat in Limehouse, a dingy place that she had chosen specifically because it was so unsuited to someone of her station (or of what she ought to believe her station to be), had been sub-let to a woman named Mercedes, who was a few years older than Cordelia and appeared to be an unreconstructed Communist. Cordelia had managed to find Mercedes another flat nearby upon her return, and they had begun to run into each other frequently in the shops and in the street. About a fortnight of occasional conversation had established to Cordelia's satisfaction that Mercedes was from Spain, rather than anywhere in Latin America; that she had not only fought for the Republicans in the Civil War but had continued fighting with the Maquis until the world political situation was remade in 1945; and that she had at that point fled Spain, first to France and then, about six months ago, after getting her English up to an acceptable level, to London. Cordelia had talked to Bridey, who had wired her some extra money, and then she had invited Mercedes out to dinner, to see if she might pick her brains a bit more about things. In order to accept, Mercedes had had to find somebody to take in her four-year-old adopted son for the evening. (She did not appear to have any husband.)

Cordelia had heard the story from an American reporter in Palestine at the beginning of the year of a Croatian man who had emigrated to the United States some time between the end of the war and the time Cordelia had had the conversation. He had had dinner at the home of another Croatian family in America, and slowly realised over the course of the meal that he had met the hostess somewhere before, and more recently than he would have liked. Finally he had stood up and said, in a loud voice, "Ma'am, your father was an Ustashi; I had him hanged, and I will not eat at his daughter's table any longer". Cordelia was worried that something like that might happen here.

As it was, a few minutes into their aperitifs Mercedes set her glass down and said "How come you have not told me you fought for Franco?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You are Cordelia Flyte, aren't you? You were in a newspaper during the war. It said that you were driving an ambulance for the Nationalist forces."

"I was at that," said Cordelia, softly, with a sudden twitchy feeling of ineradicable shame. She felt certain that Mercedes would get up and leave. She felt as if she was already alone.

Instead Mercedes picked up her glass, took a sip, put it down again, and said, her voice trembling, "May I ask how you can live with yourself?"

There was something in that "may I ask?" that demanded serious and painful recollection and critique. Under her breath Cordelia said a quick Fátima prayer. She was saying it so that everybody, everywhere, fell under the "especially", so that she would not have to ask if she herself specifically did. She knew that in saying it that way she was already answering the question she would not ask.

"I helped men who had been wounded, and nursed them until they were well," she said softly, at last. "I will not apologize for that. I will certainly not apologize for treating those ill in the prison-camps, or for leaving the country as soon as I could. I especially will not apologize for any of this because I did the same thing later, after only being home for a space of within one year, against a far greater and more obvious evil."

"That does not answer my question," Mercedes said flatly.

"I know that," Cordelia said, and took a sip. Inside her little wheels and gears were turning. Heath Robinson machines of thought and sentiment clicked around. "I did not--I aspired only to serve God."

"To 'serve God'? Is that how you thought of it?"

"At first, yes," said Cordelia. "As the war went on and I saw more of what it was about I became less sure. But I could not stop helping people, or saving them. I could only save the people on my 'side', even as I realised that so few of them were really in it for a good faith."

"There was a priest at the mill where I worked as a spy at one time, after the war," Mercedes said. "I was acting as a maid to a fascist captain who had taken his family and his men up to this little village so that they could flush us out. This priest was a miserable shill. He said solely the things that the captain wanted him to. I do not know if he ever had an original thought in his head."

"Yes," said Cordelia, "there are many priests like that." She saw saying so as at once not a concession at all and the profoundest concession she could possibly make. "At the same time, you know," she said, "I am really, truly sorry for what I did MEANT."

"What it 'meant'?"

"I started wondering about what it is that I meant the minute I got that perfunctory medal," said Cordelia, "and they sent me on my way. I had been wondering in the prison-camps, yet focusing only on ministering. Yet all the same I did wonder. Because they were not in it to serve God. Because what I meant by helping those people wasn't only that I was helping them. I meant that I was on their side, the side of Franco and the Falange as well as of the Church. That lowered the Church in people's eyes. It ought perhaps to have lowered it even further."

"I apologize if this is a difficult question," said Mercedes, "but do you still believe?"

"Yes," said Cordelia. "With all my heart I still believe."

"I see," Mercedes said. There was very little emotion here that she could possibly betray. Cordelia could see a certain regard for her in Mercedes that had been absent a moment ago, and wondered if what she had said in any way merited or deserved that reaction. If it did it was not through Cordelia's own virtues but through the inexhaustible storehouse of the merits of the saints.

"I will say this," said Cordelia. "My brother had this man who lived with him when he was in Morocco, a German who had been in the French Foreign Legion. An awful man, who was at one point in their travels seized and deported to Germany. He became a storm-trooper until my brother found him there and they concocted a plan for his escape. But he was taken to one of the camps and within a week he had hanged himself in his cell." She looked down into her glass. The candlelight flickering through the flashing wine was guttering. "I thought about that a lot in my years in Spain," she said. "In large part it is why I went to Palestine--with His Majesty's Army, during the War and after. When you and I had the same enemy."

"My enemy," said Mercedes carefully, "was still Franco." Before Cordelia could say anything that would mortify her pride any further, before Mercedes let her give herself that spiritual satisfaction, she continued, her teeth flashing as her lips flickered. "But I understand--your brother, and his friend. There was a young girl with us at the mill. She was the stepdaughter of the fascist captain." Mercedes kept saying "fascist" instead of "Falangist". That should show Cordelia how much the distinction mattered, to people who were not like her. "He treated her so horribly, and in the end he killed her. He killed her, so we killed him. That is the way of the world, Miss Flyte; if you save these people it is so that later on they are still here to kill or be killed."

"There were so many children who all of us failed to save," said Cordelia. "But may I ask--when the Republicans killed priests and nuns, was it a favour that they were doing them, by preventing them from killing or being killed later?"

"Did you not know? There were so many people on our side," said Mercedes. "I would have killed that priest; he would have been the first priest I had killed, and I might have regretted it or felt strange, but I would have killed him nor would I have seen that different from killing any other carnival barker for the fascist enemy. What made Franco and Hitler different to you and your ilk? What was the difference that you had in mind when you thought about your brother's friend while you were in my country?"

"If I had to put my finger on it," said Cordelia, "it was precisely because there were so many sides. People who would have hurt the Church or those I love were on my side. Your side too did hurt the Church and those I love. Your side did, and Hitler did." She saw Mercedes looking at her with the same wondering expression that Charles had once had, that expression that one of Cordelia's schoolroom friends had long ago explained to her when she had felt it bore at her across the schoolyard, that expression that at times seemed agog at the notion that Cordelia had ever said "love" in the past tense in her entire life.

"I cannot tell whether you are trying to justify yourself to me or to your God or to anybody any more but I can tell you very cleanly and plainly what I think," said Mercedes. "I think that you try to be good but that you were side-by-side with people who had driven your brother's friend to it, and that you may well have saved the man who killed that child whom I tried to protect."

"And I think," said Cordelia, "that if I had not done those things then I would not have come to wish the only thing I ever should have wished, the only thing anybody should wish about a situation like that in the war in your country. And if I had not wished that thing, then I would not have done my part against Hitler when the time came to it."

"What was that thing that you came to wish?" Mercedes asked.

"That there shouldn't be two sides," said Cordelia. "Or," she went on, and this genuinely preyed on her mind and weighed on her conscience, "is it that wishing that is itself something that only reactionaries do?"

"It is something," said Mercedes, "that only people do who can afford to spend time wishing."

After that they ate for a while in silence, and after that they talked about simpler and kinder things.

By the by at the end of dinner Mercedes looked up and asked, abruptly, "What does it mean to you that the Church was on the side of the fascists in my country?"

"What did it mean to me then, or what does it mean to me now? I've told you how much the idea of meaning has changed for me."

"What does it mean to you now? Since you have said you still believe."

Cordelia thought for a moment. It meant many things to her, few of them good. It would have meant less to Julia, who had returned to the faith and come over to "the right side" at the same time; or to Bridey, who had always been in the faith and always been on "the right side" (even during the General Strike he had not sided against the workers); or to Sebastian, who was on no side, not any more, but had come back to the faith while fighting to save his German friend from the wrong side. What then could it mean to Cordelia, who had always been in the faith but had before been on the wrong side? It could mean that certain types of Liberals were right in insisting that the Church ought say nothing about politics; it could mean that the Church had simply made a strategic error in being as afraid of the Western European varieties of Socialism as it was of those further East (the experience of the Labour Government seemed to bear out this possibility); it could mean that this was just the way of the world and nothing was to be done about it til Christ came again in the clouds on the right hand of power. There was also a lot to be said about how utterly centralised--modelled after revolutionised France--everything was there now; this certainly was not the principle of subsidiarity or distributism in action. Cordelia was unsure with which meaning this fact most correlated.

Finally, Cordelia was bold to say, "It means a lot of things, and not many of them are good, but one good thing that it does mean is that God is good, of course, but something needn't be good to be holy."

"I beg your pardon?"

"God is good, of course," said Cordelia again, "but, I think, something needn't be good to be holy."

"Holy?" said Mercedes.

"Yes," said Cordelia. "That's the only possible way one can defend some of what some churchmen have done."

"Why defend it?" Mercedes asked. "If it is because you believe, then why believe it? There is so much a better world than this but we might believe in so many ways for that better world to come. Why the Church, with what has happened?"

"I could ask you the same about 'why Communism?', Mercedes," Cordelia said.

"You could, yes," Mercedes said. "But will you?"

Cordelia shook her head slowly. "No, Mercedes, I will not," she said.

They got up and left. It was balmy outside and Cordelia could perceive, almost, above them, in the descending dark, a flock of homing angels. What Mercedes could perceive, she suspected, was History, as distinct from and perhaps even as over against Time.

"What family do you have, in the end?" Mercedes asked. "I've mentioned I have a brother; I've told you about him, have I not?"

"You have," Cordelia said, "and he sounds a good man, though I can't say whether a holy one. My brothers are holy men, in their ways--odd ducks, not quite in a monastery and not quite in the Lords--but I can't really say whether good ones. My sister I do not know--she is trying. I don't think I've ever known her."

"In some ways I think that sounds appealing, when I am not praying, to the God I don't believe in, that you'll find a way to be better and more comfortable and more sorry."

"Yes, but you are still praying to Him. Him in whom you don't believe. You're praying, even though He is absent. I tried to be good, even though goodness for me was absent. Bernanos said so by the end; so, I think, did Maritain and Mauriac. They ought to know, even though they might not be holy men."

They got into Cordelia's motorcar and she happily drove them off. The streets were dark, but still crawling with lively and leaping things. Cordelia herself would rather have liked to have walked, and she thought, from Mercedes' habits, that so might she; but somehow together it was not right that they should walk. It was five miles. Somehow it was right, Cordelia thought, that those five miles should gleam.

When they got back to Limehouse and Cordelia parked they stood about for half an hour looking up at the orange-black sky, so far from Brideshead, so far from the Maquis' mountains also.

"Miss Flyte, do you miss the stars?"

"Yes, I do miss them. Do you?"

"Yes, very much."

"Do you think I would deserve to have them back? Do you think I deserve any of those things, any of those little bits of happiness they give you so that you might think, 'Ah, perhaps this is just a bit like what Heaven is'?"

"Who's to say? I don't believe I would give them to you."

"I understand very well. I'm not sure if I would give them to you. Can you give me some time to think about it?"

"Of course," said Mercedes.

They kissed then. Not that Cordelia would know, but as far as she could tell it was not sexual; it was far from being sexual; ministering to dying soldiers had been more sexual. Yet all the same there was some thrill of vague transgression in it. Mercedes walked away singing a lullaby softly to herself, a soft old song and Cordelia found herself not understanding and not sure she wanted to understand the way things had gone. The kiss had had nothing of sex about it, but nothing of Judas (or of Caiaphas) either. It pointed to a world beyond sex and death. Cordelia felt herself comforted by the notion that this, at least, was something they could both believe in, and that both of them knew and understood hope. Perhaps in that world Cordelia and her siblings could make up for what they had meant.

She said the Fátima prayer again, and admitted to herself this time for whom it was meant. "Save me," she said, singular, "from the fires of Hell."


End file.
